Generative AI is at the forefront of India’s tech evolution, delivering great performance without the steep price tag. This has been possible thanks to some big players who continue to up their game. With resilient infrastructure, cutting-edge technology, and strategic investments, cloud giant AWS is helping Indian businesses scale AI while redefining price-performance benchmarks.
Satinder Pal Singh, head of solution architecture for AWS India and South Asia, leads a team of architects tasked with helping customers design scalable, efficient solutions using AWS services. During an in-depth conversation with AIM at AWS re:Invent 2024 held in Las Vegas recently, Singh shared insights into AWS’s strategic focus on India, customer needs, and groundbreaking launches that promise to redefine cloud technology in the region.
“India is a significant country for us,” Singh began, emphasising AWS’s extensive infrastructure in the country. With two operational regions—Mumbai and Hyderabad—spanning three availability zones, 33 points of presence, and nine direct connect locations, Singh noted, “We provide extensive capabilities to our customers, enabling them to leverage more than 240 services—from infrastructure to analytics, IoT, and machine learning—while keeping their data within India.”
Why Mumbai and Hyderabad?
The decision to establish data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad was driven by performance and reliability considerations while providing multi-region availability. AWS’s infrastructure is built with resilience at its core, comprising multiple availability zones, which are essentially isolated data centres capable of functioning independently.
This design has helped AWS customers achieve exceptional reliability. For instance, ANI Technologies, a leading financial service provider, utilised this setup to create a robust failover mechanism, ensuring uninterrupted services even during system failures.
Singh explained that such resilience is crucial for mission-critical applications, especially in industries like finance and healthcare.
He elaborated on the layered design of AWS’s infrastructure: “Each region consists of multiple availability zones. Think of one availability zone as one or more isolated data centres. If one zone fails, workloads can shift seamlessly to another.” This architecture ensures resilience even in extreme scenarios like natural disasters.
Generative AI, a key area of focus for AWS, has witnessed increasing interest from Indian enterprises. Singh highlighted two major innovations announced at re:Invent: model distillation and advancements in automated reasoning.
The model distillation technique, offered via Amazon Bedrock, allows smarter, cost-efficient models to inherit the learnings of larger, more accurate ones, significantly lowering operational costs without compromising on precision.
Another critical advancement is AWS’s approach to minimising hallucination in AI models using automated reasoning. Singh emphasised that this enhancement ensures model reliability, making it an ideal solution for industries like insurance and healthcare, where accuracy is non-negotiable.
These innovations are a direct response to the needs of Indian customers, who often demand high performance at lower costs. Singh detailed AWS’s use of automated reasoning to enhance model reliability. “With this, businesses like insurance companies can rest assured that their models provide accurate responses, eliminating the risk of incorrect outputs,” he said.
Custom Chips: Redefining Price-Performance
AWS’s investments in custom-built chips—Graviton, Trainium, and Inferentia—have been a game-changer for its customers. Graviton chips, designed for general workloads, have already delivered significant benefits. Companies like Zomato and Paytm reported reduced costs by up to 30% and improved performance by 20-35%, a testament to the efficiency of these chips.
Trainium and Inferentia, on the other hand, cater specifically to AI workloads. Trainium delivers a 64% performance boost compared to previous offerings, while Inferentia is optimised for inference, helping global clients save up to 40% on costs. Singh acknowledged that these advancements were critical for Indian enterprises navigating the challenges of scaling AI while managing budgets.
Upskilling India: AWS AI-Ready Program
One of the most pressing challenges for Indian organisations is the AI talent gap. Singh cited a startling statistic—while 99% of employers envision their companies becoming AI-driven organisations by 2028, nearly 79% struggle to find skilled professionals. To address this, AWS launched the AI-Ready Program, a comprehensive initiative to upskill over 2 million individuals globally by 2025.
In India alone, over 5.9 million individuals have been trained in cloud services since 2017. AWS’s investment in India’s local cloud infrastructure is projected to reach $16.4 billion by 2030, supporting 131,700 jobs annually and contributing $23.3 billion to India’s GDP by 2030.
Driving Innovation Across Industries
AWS’s democratisation of technology has empowered organisations across diverse industries. For instance, manufacturing firms like Apollo Tyres are leveraging AWS services and reported a 9% increase in productivity, while banks like Axis and HDFC enhanced customer experiences with data-driven insights.
Singh emphasised AWS’s commitment to innovation while ensuring inclusivity. “We democratise technology so that SMBs have the same access to cutting-edge capabilities as large enterprises,” he said.
The importance of AWS’s partner ecosystem cannot be overstated. Globally, AWS collaborates with over 140,000 partners, with a significant presence in India. Companies like HCLTech and Persistent Systems are leveraging AWS’s capabilities to deliver innovative solutions to their clients.
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